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"When you make a move out of stress or anger, it always ends in catastrophe." - John Casey

 

Elephant
For someone like Gus Van Sant, a director who is famous in his films portraying the mundaneness of human interactions, you would expect something better - something like Good Will Hunting perhaps.

This movie is awfully slow as we follow a few "ordinary" students through their "ordinary" day in an "ordinary" school. Maybe it got a little too "ordinary" because I found myself following the back of heads and going through a particular scene for maybe three times but from different perspectives. Sure, he is trying to convey everyone's point of view, but it got too redundant when I am seeing the same thing again and again. At one point, I am watching this kid going through his photo developing process, really thoroughly. And it made me think what is the purpose of this all. I do not know if that is point of it all, but I could not really remember all the characters vividly and some even popped out out of nowhere with no sense of purpose or reason, and before I knew it, he's cut off from the film already, ie. this Benny character (starring Bennie Dixon); I thought when he appeared at the very end of the film he would put up a fight with the shooters before going down, but instead he just merely got shot straight away. So, what is the point of bringing him into the movie anyway. The movie did not worked for me until the last ten minutes when the shootings started abruptly. Things got slightly interesting from there, but not yet desirable.

It is one of those movies about "what were you doing when it happened" kinds of events that reshape the rest of people's lives. It is unmistakable that this film got the inspiration from the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. And maybe I need to be in the middle of it all to know what it is all about. To know the normality of it all before something so tragic happened. To know the expectation of nothing in particular before it all unfolds. Then, I remember another fictional portrayal of a school shooting in one of the episodes of One Tree Hill, and the reaction I got from the latter was definitely more emotional and heart-wrenching than this film.

Well, if Gus Van Sant was planning to bring forth the originality of a boring school life, he had hit it spot on, but we are talking about a movie after all, a form of entertainment, so perhaps a little bit of drama or suspense will not hurt. If not, I might as well just reminisce my high school day and be done with it.

 

Bobby
Another "what were you doing when it happened" movie, but at least this one works better for me than the previous film. With an all-star cast, it tells the story of the days before Robert Francis Kennedy's presidential win and eventual assassination from the perspectives of the staffs and customers in the Ambassador Hotel.

A quiet Latino kitchen staff (starring Freddy Rodríguez) has to give up his tickets to the anticipated Dodgers game before he is working a double shift during the election party that night. A young black man (starring Nick Cannon) working in the Kennedy candidacy staff who have put all his hopes on Senator Kennedy for a better world for him and communities like him after the loss of Dr Martin Luther King. Two boys (starring Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty) from the same candidacy staff who forwent their promotion duties to get high in a hotel room worries if they had done enough for Senator Kennedy to win the election. A young girl (starring Lindsay Lohan) married a boy (starring Elijah Wood) from her school so that he could be spared going to war in the front lines in Vietnam. And so on. Their day before the presidential announcement was all tied together by one man and one hope, and how the assassination would undo everyone in one single blow.

I was not born during that time of the year, nor am I familiar with the desperation for the kind of hope they were looking for: one that would bring them home from war, one that would better the communities of minorities, one that would dawn on a country a new ray of sunlight, before everything was taken away with a bullet through the head. I cannot really connect with these characters - heck, I even wondered if he was John F Kennedy's son or nephew or brother, and if it had died before JFK or after - but it showed me the kind of mess they were in, how they looked up to Robert Kennedy like a saviour, and how their dreams just shattered when the news of RFK's death hit them. It just made me realised that I was quite fortunate to not have been in their shoes, and wondered if we children of today were taking it all for granted.

 

Credits: QuickFlix, IMDB